







The open content licensing standard for the AI-first Internet
RSL: Really Simple Licensing
The open content licensing standard for the AI-first Internet
Everything an open source maintainer might need to know about open source licensing | Ben Balter
There's lots of internet lore around open source licensing. An attorney and open source developer answers the most common questions.



Licenses – Open Source Initiative
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Its Time for the Open Source Community to Get Real | Blog | InfluxData
Like many open source developers, Ive been reading the commentary around Redis Common Clause Licensing with great interest (HN thread).
Licenses Alone Do Not Govern Behavior in Open Source
I put things here so they are on the internet

Some argue that dual-licensing in commercial open source indicates a lack of ability to provide superior service
This is obviously wrong. The use of dual licensing and the ability to provide superior service for open source are unrelated forms of competitive advantage, and without further circumstances, a bus…

Sorting out the Ethical Licensing Mess
Software developers who give the world, for free, usage rights to the code they write often use open source licenses to make this gift legally explicit. These free usage rights (and then some) are …

Licensing needs for Truly P2P Software
This article is preserved for historical purposes but HAS BEEN SUPERSEDED BY THE CRYPTOGRAPHIC AUTONOMY LICENSE.

Toward Copyleft Equality for All
I would not have imagined even two years ago that expansion of copyleft would become such an issue of interest in software freedom licensing. Historically and for good reason, addition of new forms of copyleft clauses has moved at a steady pace. The early 2000s brought network services clauses (such as that in the Affero GPL), which hinged primarily on requiring provision of source to network-remote users. Affero GPL implemented this via copyright-controlled permission of modification. These licenses began as experiments, and were not approved by some license certification authorities until many years later.


The intellectual property rights imperative of single-vendor open source
I guess everybody knows it but nobody ever named it, as far as I know, so I’m doing it here: The Intellectual Property Rights Imperative of Single-Vendor Commercial Open Source Always act in …

Open source is NOT a business model (and your business will fail if you think that it is)
I do not agree to the use of my copyrighted content for the training of AIs, LLMs, or similar technologies.
Time for Net Giants to Pay Fairly for the Open Source on Which They Depend | Linux Journal
Licensing lies at the heart of open source. Arguably, free software began with the publication of the GNU GPL in 1989. And since then, open-source projects are defined as such by virtue of the licenses they adopt and whether the latter meet the Open Source Definition. The continuing importance of licensing is shown by the periodic flame wars that erupt in this area. Recently, there have been two such flarings of strong feelings, both of which raise important issues.